January 20, 2023

Over 40 postdocs attended our bargaining session today on zoom!

Today we met with the Sinai administration for the 10th time. It was great to see over forty postdocs from across departments joining us at the session. Postdoc participation is particularly important given Sinai’s recent resistance to including basic workplace protections in our contract that other unionized postdocs have. Click here to RSVP for an upcoming bargaining session.

Despite a city-wide rent crisis, Sinai said they were “unwilling” to accept our proposal to allow postdocs to extend their Sinai housing while bargaining is ongoing, even though they themselves proposed a raise to take effect during bargaining just last month. This will be extremely disappointing for many postdocs, especially families facing hardship in the current environment. Sinai previously said their concerns were related to the number of postdocs starting and ending appointments, but have yet to tell us how many units are available. 

Jéromine Klingler, a postdoc in the Department of Infectious Diseases who attended the session, shared her thoughts afterwards:

“It was really stressful and frustrating to hear Sinai say they’re unwilling to extend housing for postdocs during our contract negotiations. I started my postdoc in November 2019, so I already reached the 3 year limit for my apartment. I’m also currently 7-months pregnant and Sinai ending my lease one week after my due date means that instead of bonding with my newborn baby and recovering from the delivery, I will be worrying about how to move apartments safely.” 

We again requested relevant information about the number of available units and intend to continue discussing this issue with Sinai.

Sinai provided counter proposals on eight of the sixteen articles they had on their side today. On Job Posting, we reached a tentative agreement ensuring all postdoctoral job opportunities at Sinai will be posted on the Careers website with information important for candidates. Sinai still has many important articles to respond to, including one on Workload which we proposed on October 11 last year. You can read counter proposals from today’s session here

We are also aware that postdocs did not receive our initial 3% across the board raise in our paychecks today. We asked Sinai about this and they informed us that these raises should be reflected in our next paychecks. Please email us at info@sinaipostdocunion.org if you do not receive the raise or have additional questions. 

We are currently gathering more information from postdocs to understand the extent of salary discrepancies for the pay period 12/18/2022 to 12/31/2022. If you were affected by these discrepancies, please take a minute to fill out this short survey.

Our next session is on February 1, at 9AM. Click here to attend an upcoming session. 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or thoughts,

In solidarity,

Lukas Bethlehem
GGS & Immunology
SPOC-UAW Bargaining Committee